Ann appeared in her doorway. “Well?”
Eve sat up. “Well what?”
“How was your first day?”
Eve sighed. “I’ve got a project, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do it.”
“Of course you can do it. You’re such a bright girl—”
Eve cleared her throat, and Ann corrected herself: “A bright young lady. You’ll always be a girl to me, Every. Keeps me from becoming an old woman.” But Ann had been an old woman for a long time, not in years, not even in experience. She had inflicted age upon herself in her inhibitions, hesitations, and the strange illness that left even her suspecting some unknown mental culprit.
“It’s a family history project,” Eve searched her aunt’s face for emotion.
Ann sucked her teeth. “Hmph. I thought this was a African Studies class you was taking? What they need to know about your history for? I tole you, you got to be careful about giving personal information to those folk.”
“What folk, Mama Ann?” Eve tucked her legs beneath her. “The Black professor? The university . . . ?”
“It’s all the same thang. Government. It’s a city college, ain’t it?”
Eve pursed her lips. “Tell you what. I’ll drop the class if you just tell me the information. That way, we can keep the government out of things.”
Ann didn’t know why Eve insisted on baiting her. She thought to tell Eve that perhaps the class wasn’t such a good idea after all, but as she looked into her niece’s eyes, she knew that it was not the time to argue her point.
Eve stared at her aunt. It was a practiced look—not a glare, which could be construed as disrespectful, but a wide-eyed, questioning expression, defiant only in its openness.
Ann pressed a hand to her forehead and left the room. The painfully familiar gesture no longer held the same power it had when Eve had packed for college a few years prior. It was around that time that her aunt’s headaches began. Eve abandoned her suitcase in the same manner she would later abandon her studies after one semester and rush to her aunt’s side. Her nervous excitement for the South, college, and freedom had quickly been replaced with concern for Ann’s health.
Still, she liked to revisit the memories, as brief as they were, starting with the bus ride with Nelle to Tuskegee. She thought about Nelle’s assertion that college was about adulthood and choices and how, as they cuddled together on the Greyhound bus, neither had a clue about the choices that would later test the seams of their friendship.
Jogged by the memory, Eve grabbed the receiver of the telephone and spun out her best friend’s number on the rotary dial. It was Nelle who had urged her to take a Black studies class as they sat one evening having dinner at Gladys’s Luncheonette in Bronzeville. Eve had been in the middle of trying to explain to Nelle the emptiness she had been feeling.
“Maybe I should’ve stayed in Alabama and finished school with you,” she confided as Nelle pulled a compact from her brown suede knapsack whose fringes reminded Eve of moccasins. Nelle reapplied her lip gloss and frowned in the mirror as she patted her hair. It had been her attempt at an afro, but it had more curl than the regal fluff required for an impressive girth. She looked at Eve’s hair, which had been pressed into submission by Ann’s hot comb.
“You don’t know how blessed you are, Every. Dig?” Nelle’s inquiries were always punctuated by the latest slang. It would have been an annoying habit, especially as it was shared by so many of her contemporaries, but Nelle had a way of owning such indulgences of popular culture so that they seemed to have belonged to no one before her.
Eve sighed. “Take the damn hair, Nelle! I don’t want it.”
“Chill, sista,” Nelle gushed. “C’mon, Every,” Nelle and Ann were the only ones who continued to address Eve by her given name. “It’s time. You got all this confusion inside, like so many other sisters out here. We’re all trying to find out about ourselves as a people. You don’t have to do it by yourself.”
“Don’t I?” Eve responded. “Every time I try to find out about my family, I get shut down. And every time I try to move around not knowing, I get kicked back to needing to know. And Mama Ann—” she faltered. Eve had only been at Tuskegee for one semester when Ann’s illness worsened. She came home that winter break and never went back. But Nelle had stayed and graduated with an English degree and an eye toward journalism.
“I ain’t talking ’bout Mama Ann.” Nelle smiled.
Eve had been curious, and the more Nelle spoke about how Blacks were doing research to uncover their family histories, their ancestries, and even reaching back to Africa, the less restriction she began to feel in her chest. Eve sighed. Her next breath filled with the heavy aroma of collard greens, northern beans, and smothered chicken placed before her by an enviably Afroed waitress.
“Just sign up for one class, sis.” Nelle extended her palm to Eve and smiled slyly. Her attention drifted and lingered on the waitress depositing their food.
Eve loudly cleared her throat drawing Nelle’s focus back to her.
As the waitress departed, Nelle shrugged. “What? She’s cute.”
Eve pressed a finger to her temple. “Can you not do that around me?” They ate their meal in silence.
In her room, phone pressed to her ear, Eve continued to stare at the space her aunt had occupied moments before. When Nelle answered, all that Eve could muster was a half-hearted, “Hey.”
Nelle read Eve’s tone. “You could always bunk with me. We could get a righteous two-bedroom in the old neighborhood right now.”
Eve was silent. It wasn’t an option for her. Nelle was her best friend, and there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for her, but living with her was out of the question. She groped for what had become a familiar excuse. “Mama Ann’s health . . .”
On the other end of the line, Nelle sighed and wondered why she continued to offer. Although Eve had left before completing her degree, the experience had disrupted their friendship. “Yeah. Sure. Mama Ann may not realize it, and you for damn sure don’t realize it. That woman ain’t old! Shit, my own mother is knocking on fifty. Mama Ann is gonna tap dance on all our graves.”
In the background of Eve’s room, Mavis Staples crooned from the radio, “I know a place . . . ain’t nobody cryin’ . . . I’ll take you there . . .”
“Thanks for the offer. But I just . . . you know.” Eve lowered her voice, cowering away from their unspoken issue. Discovering Nelle’s sexuality, as much as anyone can discover another’s fundamental qualities, had devastated Eve. Her own understanding of sexuality had been carefully curated by Ann and the Baptist Church that claimed their Sunday mornings. Both were clear on the matter: homosexuality was a sin. Although the church also claims that people are born into sin, it was clear that in the unofficial hierarchy of sinning, where unmarried sex is bad, same-gender sex is worse. Eve didn’t know if there was a worst place in hell for the sinniest of sins, but she did know that she didn’t want to be there bearing witness to what the minister regularly labeled “unnatural acts.”
“Yeah, I know,” Nelle conceded. She didn’t fully understand Eve’s withdrawal from their friendship. It reminded her of her early foray into literary theory, when she would read a sentence, know all the words it comprised, yet fail to comprehend the concept or thought it intended to communicate. Nelle had attended the same church as Eve and her aunt, heard the same dogma, but had no clue how they arrived at a conclusion so completely different from what she believed. She bore witness to the same brutality to women—Black women in particular—by every race and gender on the planet and did not understand how Black women did not make a covenant of loving each other in any manner—intimately, romantically, sisterly, maternally. Still, Nelle was intent on serving as an example of nonthreatening lesbianism to her friend.
“So, what’s it gonna take to get you out your funk this time?” Nelle asked. “Food? Drink? B
oth?”
The smooth sounds of the Staple Singers gave way to the strong percussion rap and electric guitar of Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop.” Eve’s lips cracked into her first smile of the day. “How about getting deeper into the funk?” She cranked the volume up, and she and Nelle sang along, temporarily drowning out her anxiety and, seconds later, Ann’s timid knocks on her bedroom door.
Three
motherless child
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and respect for strength—
in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
—Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
When Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago in 1965, he targeted two white neighborhoods in which to stage protest marches against unfair real estate practices: Cicero, site of the prior decade’s infamous race riot, and the southwestern neighborhood of Marquette Park. King’s safety was entrusted to the Blackstone Rangers, both a street gang and political organization—a double consciousness nonexistent in successor gangs.
Lee Roy Duncan would find a home with the Blackstone Rangers that provided a stability that had been missing in his own home. Raised by his paternal grandmother, he felt the absence that the Rangers spoke of when recruiting men who were missing men in their lives. His grandmother was old, and they moved around each other in the ways of people who care but really have nothing in common outside of their mutual responsibility to one another. Lee Roy’s condition couldn’t be reduced to a simple need for a father figure or peers or a mother; it was all of them, or maybe even none of them. He was what they called a “high-yella” boy, a redbone. It caused his face to redden when it ought not to have. Betrayed by his complexion, Lee Roy blushed when pigtailed girls sauntered past. He flushed when other boys bristled before him, extending their chests, their darker skin tones never betraying their fear or embarrassment. Some say the mark that Cain bore was what became known as a racialized darkness to set him apart from more fair and righteous men. Surely Lee Roy was the inverse of this myth: marked by paleness and punished for this difference.
As a youth, he was bullied. And because the source of his neighborhood combatants’ disdain for him was the fairness of his skin, it was on this that they exercised their abuse. The world whispered to them that he was beautiful, or as close to beauty as a Black boy could get, and they were ugly. They could not reach the world, but they tried by pushing their fists through Lee Roy’s buttermilk skin. He fought admirably. Sometimes he won; sometimes he lost; yet the easy bruising of his delicate skin would corroborate whatever narrative his assailants concocted. At which point they no longer wasted their energy on trying to best him but settled for scoring a “red mark,” a blow whose evidence would remain.
Eventually the bullying fell to a standstill during Lee Roy’s late teenage years as he became adept at blocking and dodging hits to his face. By the time the early1960s rolled out Muhammad Ali, the smooth-skinned world champion boxer who boasted about protecting his “pretty” face, Lee Roy had been in the practice for years. He was able to hold his own for a while—until the poling. This is when the Rangers found him. They saved him. They had watched Lee Roy with growing interest over the months, witnessed his dexterity and strength in fending off the neighborhood darkies, as they called the other boys who shared their rich skin tones but fell short on the ideology of brotherhood, boys whose anger had turned inward like the hairs that abscessed in their chins, making them lash out at everything in their vicinity because they could not reach the true cause of their condition.
They meted out their frustrations in lighthearted jostling matches with each other that were always bound to turn serious, each destined for a moment when the playful shove of a comrade would catch them off guard and anger would flash across their faces before being quickly reeled in. But pulled punches build, and such was the case the final time the neighborhood boys laid hands on Lee Roy.
They had been hanging about in the alley, when Lee Roy ambled past. Tiny, the largest one, had beaten everyone in slap boxing and was looking for a new challenger. The rest, weary of their losses, encouraged Tiny’s trash talk directed at Lee Roy. But Lee Roy didn’t stop. He pushed past their sweaty bodies until dark, damp hands grabbed his shoulders.
Lee Roy swung furiously, taking them all by surprise. He jabbed and pounced until all they could do to end his barrage of punches was lift him, each struggling with one of his flailing limbs, uncertain of what to do with the fitful form. Then Lil Joe, the smallest of them, thought of a most sinister punishment. “Pole his yella ass,” he directed.
They hesitated. “What the hell y’all waiting for?” Lil Joe screeched. “This boy think he white. Let’s show ’em what it is to be nigga.”
Tiny nervously drew his large palm across his forehead. “C’mon now, Lil Joe. Ain’t no cause for that. We just—”
“You just gonna ram that nigga’s nuts right into that pole, Tiny,” Lil Joe interrupted. “Shit, better from us. We educating him.”
A weary moan escaped Lee Roy, and they nearly dropped him as he became dead weight in their arms. They strengthened their hold and marched, two grasping him under the shoulders and two each grasping a leg—slowly parting from one another as they picked up speed. Lee Roy clenched his eyes and mouth, bracing for an impact that never came. He opened his eyes to what seemed to him a battalion of men in red berets. The Blackstone Rangers had watched him enough and decided to intervene.
Lee Roy felt a sense of wholeness when he wore the Rangers’ trademark red beret and strolled through their Woodlawn neighborhood. He felt a strength unparalleled in any other aspect of his life as he joined in their refrain: “Look out, stranger. Here lurks danger, if you’re not a Blackstone Ranger.” He even had a mentor, the closest he’d ever known to a big brother. Rick had singlehandedly pulled Lee Roy from despair beginning that fateful day when he stopped the neighborhood poling.
To his credit, Lee Roy threw his entire being into his Ranger identity. He worked their community events, attended all the meetings, and was even employed in their businesses. He could have stayed in that place forever, locked in brotherhood, but the Rangers were about progression and movement, even if their progression did not result in a political movement. Eventually, they absorbed twenty-one local gangs and became the P. Stone Nation, symbolized by a twenty-one stone pyramid. What occurred afterward was somewhat typical of large organizations: opinions differed, the focus changed, and leaders split off to form their own factions, like the Islamic-based El Rukns. Street gangs dropped politics and picked up drug distribution. Criminal activity was no longer a means to an end; it was the means and the end.
Rick tried to explain, “Look, Lil Brotha, this game is rigged. We follow the rules, we get slammed. We are lab rats in our communities.”
“Then why sell poison in our own communities, Rick?” Lee Roy pleaded more than queried.
Rick’s silence had been his answer. The drug game was not for Lee Roy. He needed something else.
By early 1965 adulthood and neighborhood politics made friends of Lee Roy and his boyhood tormentors. They helped him adjust to leaving the Rangers and were his support when his grandmother died. Much of Lee Roy’s spare time prior to her death had been spent in the library, discovering books. Lee Roy looked to the past to find out how previous generations had handled the color issue. The pages of DuBois courted him, but Lee Roy found the most encouragement from Booker T. Washington’s autobiography and his Atlanta Exposition speech declaring that he should cast down his bucket where he was. But Lee Roy was in limbo. He felt his own greatness stifled in Chicago. A nascent Chicago revolutionary, Lee Roy was a redundancy. He could not build what already existed. But the South could use him. Weren’t all the Black folks flocking north?
The morning of his grandmother’s funeral, he sat in her small apartment and cried until his shoulders ached from the convulsions. He cried harder than the time his grandmother
told him that his father wasn’t coming home, harder than when she told him his mother was a white woman—which was a fate like death to his seven-year-old sensibilities. He cleaned his tear-streaked face and took the Cottage Grove bus to Leak Funeral Home.
A. R. Leak Funeral Home had been laying out dead Black people since 1933. One week prior to Lee Roy’s grandmother, Leak opened its doors to the thousands who attended services for legendary soul singer Sam Cooke. The crowd swelled until it crushed the parlor windows, and James Brown had to leave before paying his respects. There was no swollen throng of grievers at the funeral of Lee Roy’s grandmother. No Ray Charles to sing “The Angels Keep Watching Over Me.” Just Woodlawn neighbors, an organist, and soloist singing “Trouble of the World” in a voice that was nothing like Mahalia Jackson’s. It was too high to convey the trouble of the world as so tiresome and burdensome that the decedent had found relief in death. This soloist sang as if the trouble were manageable.
Lee Roy sat in the front pew, feeling a loneliness that paled that which had compelled him in those earlier years to join the Blackstone Rangers. Neighbors spoke of his grandmother in two-minute praises. Community organizations gave resolutions in her name. She was eulogized by a minister that Lee Roy did not know at a church that he had not attended.
“Clara was a godly woman . . .”
“Always feeding those in need . . .”
The testimonials ran into each other, and faces blended into a single conglomerate of brown, wrinkled skin and woolen hair thickened with gray. His grandma Clara present in the words of her community.
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